Young filmmakers win inaugural Insta Film competition at Sarasota Film Festival

Sunday, April 21st 2019, 5:09 PM EDT

Updated:

Sunday, April 21st 2019, 7:07 PM EDT

By Alejandro Romero

SARASOTA -

Suncoast College students had the opportunity to go toe to toe with filmmakers in a new competition at the Sarasota Film Festival. “You can really see this interesting approach that filmmakers took to utilizing the elements,” said Director of Education at Sarasota Film Festival Paul Ratner.

The inaugural Insta Films competition challenged students to create a short film in just 48 hours.

“Beyond the short film they’re supposed to produce, they need to come up with a very, very short version that’s just for social media,” said Ratner.

The winning short film “Dial tone” follows a girl who is being stalked and harassed by a boy she went on a date with. Directed by Fernando Roman, Ivan Zakharenko, and John Cotter, the themes of the film were chosen at random and had to incorporate an item.

“We decided to pick a topic that something is relevant to our time and especially stalking and cyber bullying and relationships to certain girls it’s something important and we wanted to mention it and create an awareness about it,” said Zakharenko.

With a limited time to film the group faced minor challenges in shooting some scenes.

“We found because we were in such time constraints that we really couldn’t set up a plan list of how we were gonna tackle each scene in the movie, so we found ourselves scrambling a lot," said Cotter.

Though filming was stressful the group shot some of their best scenes under pressure. “There was still stress with this project but we took it more calm and everything just happened how it needed to happen,” said Roman.

All three young filmmakers have plans to continue making films in the future.